Libyan leader's unscripted speech touched on various issues including swine flu and the JFK assassination

Muammar Gaddafi threw the UN general assembly into chaos today when he effectively hijacked the podium to make a rambling, unscripted speech.

The Libyan leader had been scheduled to speak for 15 minutes but spoke for over an hour and a half, in a wide-ranging, passionate address which took in the UN security council, the assassination of US president John F Kennedy, Somali piracy and a theory that swine flu was created for military purposes.

Gaddafi took to the rostrum at 4pm, prompting several UN delegates to leave the hall. When they tentatively returned 30 minutes later, expecting the Libyan to have finished, he was only a third of the way into his speech.

Gaddafi, who frequently broke off to pore over pages of notes, said the security council should be called "the terror council", saying: "We cannot have the security council under countries which have nuclear powers. This is terrorism itself."

The Libyan leader, who arrived in New York yesterday, also called for a permanent seat on the security council for the African Union - prompting applause from a handful of African states - and invited anyone who disagreed with him to an impromptu debate on the general assembly floor.

An hour into his speech, Gaddafi complained at some length about being jet-lagged from the 10-hour flight to New York, and having to get up early for the general assembly. Dressed in long brown robes and wearing a black hat, Libya's leader gesticulated with his speech papers - revealing his notes to be handwritten, at a variety of angles and in various colours, on pieces of paper torn from a notebook.

He eventually left the floor at 5.33pm, having promoted his website, Gaddafi Speaks.

Gordon Brown had been due to speak at the end of the morning session, but it is not clear if that will still happen.

Despite the mind-numbing length of his speech Gaddafi failed to break the all time record set by Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 1960, at four and a half hours.

NEW YORK (JTA) -- Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi insinuated that Israel was behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Speaking Wednesday at the United Nations General Assembly, Gadhafi implied that Israel may have plotted to kill Kennedy in 1963 because he allegedly wanted to launch a probe into its clandestine nuclear program.

“Jack Ruby, an Israeli, killed Lee Harvey Oswald,” the Libyan leader was quoted by the translator as saying. “Why did this Israeli kill Harvey? Ruby later died mysteriously. The whole world should know that Kennedy wanted to investigate the actions of the Israeli nuclear reactor in Dimona.”

Ruby, a local nightclub owner who was Jewish, shot Oswald, the only official suspect in the Kennedy slaying, just days after Oswald's arrest. Despite persistent conspiracy theories, numerous investigative committees have pointed at Oswald as plotting and carrying out the murder by himself.

During his speech, Gadhafi also blamed Israel for the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in which Lebanese militants murdered hundreds of Palestinians in a refugee camp in an area under Israeli control, as well as for the 2008 conflict in Gaza.

The firebrand leader added that the Arabs had historically been friends of the Jewish people and blasted Europe for mistreating the Jews.

“You are the ones that brought on them the Holocaust,” he said.”We gave them havens during the Spanish Inquistion. We are not enemies of the Jews. The Jews will one day need the Arabs, and then the Arabs will give them protection.”

On the topic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Gadhafi said the two-state solution was impractical geographically because Israel and Palestine “overlapped.” Instead, he called for the creation of a single democratic state in which both Jews and Arabs lived together.

“The Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat generation is over,” he said, referring to the now comatose former prime minister of Israel and the late leader of the Palestinian Authority. “Look at the Palestinian and Israeli youth; they want to live under one state.”

Meanwhile, Gadhafi was ordered to stop erecting a Bedouin-style tent in a New York suburb. Officials of Bedford ordered the Libyan workers to stop Wednesday because they do not have a work permit, The New York Post reported.

The property on which the tent was going up is owned by Donald Trump, who rents it out for tens of thousands of dollars a month, according to the newspaper. Gadhafi's tent reportedly was wired for electricity and had a satellite television dish. Gadhafi reportedly will sleep at the Libyan mission in downtown Manhattan.

Opposition quashed Gadhafi's plans to erect a tent in Englewood, N.J., and in Central Park. This is his first presidential visit to the United States.